Tagline: "The most COMPLETE and only TRUE STORY of BIGFOOT ever filmed."
Plot: A naturalist played by George Lauris adopts his best Wild Kingdom tone and narrates his expedition into "Bigfoot Country." His partners: a colorful prospector, a skeptical newsman, a cranky cook, and a pale-faced, scraggly-wigged "Indian" tracker. The traveling party spends most of its time watching the wildlife ferocious grizzlies, playful otters in the snow, and so forth and swapping stories about past documented encounters with Bigfoot. Every few days, the Indian (played by Joe Morello) points to signs that they're "entering the domain of the Sasquatch," but aside from a few screams in the woods and one physical encounter in the dark of night, the beast remains frustratingly out of reach.
Key scenes: A flashback to a 1920s Bigfoot attack is re-enacted by what looks like gorilla-suited men smashing windows and tossing papier-mâché boulders. Later, in a somewhat less thrilling sequence, the blustery chowhound played by Jim Bradford saves the camp's lone roll of toilet paper by chasing after a thieving raccoon.
Can easily be distinguished by: The endless shots of woodland creatures, which give Sasquatch a documentary feel that's largely undermined by the cartoonish characters. While Lauris talks soberly about how the party had to kill a wildcat because it "had the taste of pack horse in its mouth," his cornpone colleagues are busy falling over logs.
Sign that it was made in 1975: A room-sized computer pinpoints the location of the Sasquatch region and even sketches a theoretical picture of the beast, based on data fed in on punch cards.
Timeless message: The Pacific Northwest is awfully pretty.
Memorable quotes: "The Sasquatch was here, all right. I caught his smell on the wind. It's sort of... rotten-smelling."
Available alongside Snow Creature and Snow Beast on Retromedia's Sasquatch Horror Triple Feature DVD.
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